The PIMMS workshop was the last in the series of three workshops forming the basis of the LICSB thematic programme. The workshop was well attended with 37 registered attendees participating at the meeting and in all there were 12 talks given with 4 of these being invited speakers.
The organisers were delighted that Prof Andrew Millar from the University of Edinburgh was able to give the first invited talk which focused on how the adoption of a systems biology perspective is helping elucidate the underlying biochemical mechanisms of circadian clocks. The clear message which came from his talk was the importance of inferential methodology in advancing our understanding of modern day biology. This then set the scene for the other contributions which ranged from the use of SVM methods in inferring ODE parameter values to the development of population MCMC methodology in estimating Bayes factors for ODE models. The second invited speaker, Prof Lorenz Wernisch from MRC Biostatistics Cambridge focused on highlighting the utility of Gaussian Process prior models in the reconstruction of protein concentration profiles which was then followed by a study of various methods of estimation Bayes factors for ODE models and the final presentation focused on some of the issues surrounding pharmacokinetic modelling.
The final day of the workshop had two invited speakers, Dirk Husmeier from BIOSS and Julio Vera from University of Rostock. Dr Husmeier presented his recent work on the data driven reconstruction of gene regulatory networks employing varying experimental conditions and prior knowledge, this took a fully Bayesian perspective and many of the technical details of defining appropriate priors for this task were carefully presented. Dr Veras, on the other hand, presented the power-law modelling framework for ODE-based biochemical modelling suggesting some of the inferential issues which may arise. The remaining contributed talks consisted of two presentations on stochastic models (SDE) and steps being taken in performing inference over such models. Finally there was one talk on modeling genetic recombination and presentation on a software tool for performing Bayesian inference over ODE-based biochemical models.
There was also a lively and extended discussion session at the end of the first day which has been transcribed into a document and can be found at the website of the workshop www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/pimms. Overall the attendees were very enthusiastic about the workshop, the topics discussed and presentations made and this has motivated the organisation of a number of other related workshops e.g. Warwick, Glasgow 2008 which will be seeking to take the themes of Practical Inference methods for Mechanistic Modelling of Biological Systems forward. |
